Collected Poems [NOOK Book]

Overview

Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and ...

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Overview

Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo’s poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.” Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem “The Hellgate,” are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.

What People Are Saying

Peter Gizzi

“Joseph Ceravolo’s poetry, like the very best poetry, is at once timeless and contemporary, magical and truthful, visionary and real. One never ceases to be moved and astonished by his highly original poetics. His work is always revelatory. Always.”

Donald Revell

“To read the poems of Joseph Ceravolo is to stride in radiance and through a coronal of colors, all of them tender. And yet his tenderness and the purity of his vision are not fragile, not ephemeral. Ceravolo is the strongest of American poets, the Villon of our apocalypse. His color is words, but his shape is the shape of action.”

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

"The overlooked genius of American poetry," as David Lethem states in the introduction, Ceravolo (1934–88) emerges from the opening poems of his first book, Fits of Dawn (1965), as speech churns sound and meaning goes 'round and 'round—"Mounting!/ O dive! song song restay fairness of/ dawn. That cry of/ booze that sparrow/ of soul 'miradel'/ unique justly lotus/ nothingless char of sunday./ Vicious of moon for the actual./ Live digress." His first-ever collected; essential.—AP

Publishers Weekly

Fascinating, unwieldy, and sometimes sublime, this first collected for the New Jersey–based Ceravolo (1934-88) reveals a poet wilder—and potentially far more popular—than the one all but a few strong admirers know. A friend of the New York School poets whose work (especially that of Ted Berrigan) his early writings resemble, Ceravolo came into his own with Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1969), where modernist dislocations receded in favor of childlike wonder at children, weather, buildings, and sex: “Daytime is not a brain,/ Living is not a cricket’s song./ Why does light diffuse/ As earth turns away from the sun?” Ceravolo’s many odes, prayers and exclamations seem very in tune with the late 1960s, yet also in touch with a timeless, excited mysticism: “Now I see that love/ is the only clarity I feared.” Ceravolo continued in these exalted modes through the exciting—and long obscure—Millenium Dust (1982) and into the massive, previously unpublished Mad Angels, where his impatience, and lack of an audience, can seem all too primitive, really naive: “Soothe me, O spirit!/ in the intestines of creation/ until I breathe right, sing right.” This big book will spark new interest; it might even attract fans of Rumi, or of the Beats. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

“We’re getting nervous and shaky just thinking about it–unless that’s the overcoffee–no, no, it’s all due to the forthcoming Collected Poems…”—Harriet, the Poetry Foundation Blog

“‘The overlooked genius of American poetry,’ as David Lethem states in the introduction, Ceravolo (1934–88) emerges from the opening poems of his first book, Fits of Dawn (1965), as speech churns sound and meaning goes ’round and ’round—‘Mounting!/ O dive! song song restay fairness of/ dawn. That cry of/ booze that sparrow/ of soul ‘miradel’/ unique justly lotus/ nothingless char of sunday./ Vicious of moon for the actual./ Live digress.’ His first-ever collected; essential.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Fascinating, unwieldy, and sometimes sublime, this first collected for the New Jersey–based Ceravolo (1934-88) reveals a poet wilder—and potentially far more popular—than the one all but a few strong admirers know.…This big book will spark new interest; it might even attract fans of Rumi, or of the Beats.”—Publishers Weekly

“Ceravolo transcends the canon…(his) verse is at once classical and fresh, tender and profound, succinct and expansive, tantalizingly parseable yet divinely ineffable. It would take a lifetime of expert reading to fully appreciate this lifetime of superlative writing; with the long-awaited publication of a collected Ceravolo, America’s contemporary poetry readers now have the opportunity to do their part.”—Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

JOSEPH CERAVOLO (1934–1988) was a poet and civil engineer who was born in Astoria, Queens, and lived in New Jersey. He was the author of six books of poetry and won the first Frank O’Hara Award. ROSEMARY CERAVOLO is an artist, novelist, and art critic. She lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey. PARKER SMATHERS is a poet and editor at Wesleyan University Press. DAVID LEHMAN is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School.

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